Not Boring Capital Fund 2

About Not Boring Capital

Packy McCormick made his name creating the ‘Not Boring’ newsletter and leveraged that into becoming an investor.

In his LinkedIn words:

Not Boring is a media & venture capital firm.

Not Boring Media produces content at the intersection of business, strategy, technology and web3. The Not Boring newsletter, written by Packy McCormick, is the #1 Business newsletter on Substack with over 115,000 subscribers. Not Boring also produces the “Not Boring Founders” podcast – which is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Not Boring Capital invests in companies with stories to tell, and helps tell them.

He raised $8m in 2021 for fund 1 and then $30m for fund 2. He started out with the “Not Boring Syndicate”, investing in $4m in 20 companies.

Not Boring Fund 2

The strategy for Fund II is similar to the strategy for Fund I: invest in the best companies across verticals – web2 and web3, bits and atoms – at any stage, with a heavier concentration in earlier stages, and help them tell their stories. Maximize winners, don’t minimize losers. The average check size will just be bigger.

Fund 2 structure

Packy setup a parallel fund structure for the fund to manage investor limits.

For Fund I, we hit the $9.9M cap with 133  LPs – a lot for a small fund, but not as many as I’d like!

After deploying the $9.9M Fund I in six months, I wanted to go bigger for Fund II: more money to invest, and more LPs. So I worked with the one and only Jenn Jordache at AngelList to set up a parallel fund structure – which puts all of the Qualified Purchasers ($5M+ in invested assets) in one fund and leaves more room in the $10M / 249 person fund for accredited investors.

Having that room is really important to me. I’ve asked LPs who wanted to write bigger checks to keep them smaller and turned down introductions to people who aren’t Not Boring readers.

Not Boring Capital Memos

Packy opted to write memos rather than a pitch deck. This is not a common thing to do. Around 5 startups have done so, and I think the only public example is CapitalX (see in the collection).

About writing memos

Packy wrote:

A venture capital fund is kind of like a startup. New fund managers (General Partners, or GPs) put together a deck (or in my case, a memo) highlighting the types of companies they’re planning to invest in, and how they are uniquely positioned to invest in the very best of that type of company, and they go out to pitch investors (Limited Partners, or LPs) on how that will translate into above-average returns.

In a traditional PR announcement, this is the part where a journalist would say, “McCormick plans to invest in technology companies across many stages of their life, and believes that his ability to help companies tell their stories will help him get access to deals (we’re skeptical, although founders may be attracted to Not Boring’s audience of 60k readers).” Or something like that. Fair, but not particularly compelling.

Instead of trying to boil it down to a pithy one-liner, I’m going to just share the actual memo that I wrote and shared with all of my potential LPs, lightly redacted and heavily annotated with commentary and clarification on certain ideas, examples, and terms.

Fund 1

You can see fund 1 here:

Not Boring Fund 2

Fund 2

Fund 3

There is no deck shared yet, but Packy wrote:

• $30 million Fund with a hard cap at $50 million.
• Updated strategy more concentrated, early stage, Hard Startups, new team members.
• Early Fund III Investments in biotech, energy, education, web3, and supply chain alongside Lux, a16z, Thrive, Sequoia, Greylock, 8VC, and more.
• Backed by many of the same excellent LPs as Funds I & II.
• Opening the Fund to accredited Not Boring readers.

In the reading list below you can link to his full post.

Supporting reading

• Introducing Not Boring Capital– This is a fab rear as one would expect!
• Not Boring Capital: 2 Fund, 2 Boring –  Not Boring Capital’s $30M Fund II and the Value of Weird Investments
• Announcing Not Boring Capital Fund III –  A $30 million Fund to invest in Hard Startups and tell their stories

Deck collection

You can see all the other venture capital pitch decks in this collection  by smacking the button below:

VC Pitch Decks